The subprime mortgage crisis of 2009 prompted a massive spike in unemployment across the American economy, sending many workers, college educated and not, into severe financial distress. Educated workers, as they long had, continued to enjoy both a wage premium and a significantly lower unemployment rate. As seen from the articles on this site https://customwriting.com, then in 2009, the first year of Obama's presidency, Americans holding a bachelor's degree earned $1,025 a week and had an unemployment rate of 5.2%, compared to those with only a high school diploma, who made an average of $626 a week and had an unemployment rate of 9.7%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This advantage, however, masked deep problems. To begin with, while the advantage in the unemployment rate was impressive, the typical rate for college graduates has historically been below 4%, demonstrating that while the relative advantage over those without a college education was robust, in absolute terms the odds of a college graduate being unemployed had risen fairly sharply. What's more, these overall unemployment figures consider workers of all ages. A particular difficulty of this recent financial turmoil has been the unusual depth of the crisis for the youngest workers, recent high school and college graduates. In the post-financial crisis labor market, college graduates under the age of 25 reached a peak unemployment rate of above 9.5% in 2009. 14 In other words, while recent college graduates maintained a lead over members of their own age cohort, their overall employment numbers were close to that of those with only a high school diploma across the age spectrum. Compounding matters were the explosion in student debt loads.

The Project on Student Debt reports that, for the class of 2012 (who entered college in fall of 2008, at the beginning of the financial crisis), "seven in 10 college seniors... had student loan debt, with an average of $29,400 for those with loans." 15 In large measure, this student loan crisis was the product of rapidly increasing tuition costs. According to the College Board, in the decade spanning from 2002- 2003 to 2012-2013, average tuition rates nationwide rose at a rate of 5.2% relative to inflation. 16 In the early years of the Obama administration, then, college students were graduating with more debt than ever, into a punishing labor market that could not provide many of them with the kinds of jobs they expected to find.